Lighttpd

Basic Options

{{{
Options +FollowSymLinks
}}}

becomes

{{{
server.follow-symlinks = "enable"
}}}

mod_rewrite

[http://www.lighttpd.net/documentation/rewrite.html mod_rewrite] is more trickier as the idea how it is handled is completly different.

First of all we always match on the full relative request-uri that is submitted by the user. That means that we are always using the [QSA] flag from mod_rewrite in Apache.

This is example is taken from http://dir.onlinesearch.ws/ (thanks to dbird@freenode)

{{{
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /instadir/
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -d

1. Fix trailing slash problem
   RewriteRule ^(.+[/])$ $1/ [R,L]
2. Do not try to treat the following resources as parameters to index.php
   RewriteRule ^index.php.*$ - [L]
   RewriteRule ^dmoz.css$ - [L]
   RewriteRule ^admin[/]?.*$ - [L]
   RewriteRule ^img[/]?.*$ - [L]
   RewriteRule ^[/]{0,}(.*)$ index.php?area=browse&cat=$1 [QSA,L]
   }}}

These rewrites want to rewrite everything that is not the index.php, dmoz.css, admin-interface or something from the image-directory to a parameter of the index.php page. The base directory for this match is ''/installdir/''

{{{

1. for all URLs in /instadir/ that are not index.php, dmoz.css, admin or img, do ...
   $HTTP["url"] =~ "^/instadir/(?!index.php|dmoz.css|admin|img)" {
   url.rewrite = ( "^/instadir/(.*)" => "/instadir/index.php?area=browse&cat=$1")
   }
   }}}

The conditional is using from regex-magic called [http://perlpod.com/5.9.1/pod/perlre.html#Extended%20Patterns zero-width negative look-ahead assertion] and is something from the advance chapters of your regex book.